Sun Continues to Shine on ASPs

Holding the top rank in order of priority of the various announcements made by Sun Microsystems(SUNW) this week is news of SunTone Certification and Branding Program's growth.

Announced at Supercomm, the overall membership of SPs, ISVs and NEPs for the program has surpassed the 300 mark. According to the company, the number of companies with services meeting Level One of the SunTone Certification standard has reached 15.
Holding the top rank in order of priority of the various announcements made by Sun this week is news of SunTone Certification and Branding Program's growth.

Among the ASPs celebrating their inclusion in the latest batch of SunTone branded partners are Asera, HostPro, Inc. and Pilot Network Services. These companies join the ranks of the others such as Corio, Digex, Exodus, Portera and USinternetworking, all providing SunTone certified services.

SunTone Certification no doubt is a sought-after badge of competence as an ASP. Certification under the SunTone program is designed to provide end-user customers the confidence that every aspect of an SP's operations and infrastructure has been evaluated and judged to be reliable and high quality.

It is apparent that Sun is taking a leadership role in putting reliability in the Web.

"SunTone program provides SPs with the comprehensive resources and tools they need to architect and certify their solutions," Dwyer said.

It is no doubt that this could be a solution set that ASPs and other providers will be interested in looking at to wireless-enable their offerings.

iForce Solution is designed to provide enterprises, content providers and service providers with a flexible and powerful infrastructure for deploying wireless-enables portals and services, according to the company.

Customers can now develop and deliver secure, personalized and localized information, communication, commerce and entertainment services to customers on a wide variety of wireless devices and platforms.

The iForce wireless solution set was developed with solutions by Sun and 19 others, including 724 Solutions, Inc., BroadVision, Everypath, Inc., Nokia, Phone.com, Portal Software, Siebel Systems, SignalSoft and Vignette, all of which will be incorporated into Sun's iForce Reach Center.

"In pulling together the best of industry partner technologies for our iForce wireless solution set initiative, Sun is helping companies easily create their ideal, end-to-end mobile wireless infrastructure for delivery of content and services to their consumers anywhere and on any device," Doug Kaewert, vice president, market development.

According to the company, the Ready Center will assist Sun customers evaluate a wireless approach to find what best fits their business needs. The Ready Center will conduct proof-of-concept demonstrations of Sun and industry partner solutions, providing customers with architectural blueprints or guidelines for the design, development and deployment of dotcom services on the Sun platform.